Much Ado About Something

‘Boesman and Lena’

When this classic play about a couple wandering the wastelands of apartheid had its debut in South Africa in 1969, its white author, Athol Fugard, played Boesman in blackface. Fifty years later, the harrowing revival directed by Yaël Farber for the Signature Theater Company would obviously have to feature black actors; all were superb. But in this post-apartheid era, the play seemed to have recast itself too. Boesman and Lena became archetypes of the broader human condition of poverty; not South Africa’s peculiar (and remediable) problem but the world’s eternal one.

‘Marys Seacole’

The venturesome 19th-century Jamaican nurse played so forbiddingly by the fearless Quincy Tyler Bernstine is but one of the health workers in this tornado-like play by Jackie Sibblies Drury. The others are fictional latter-day variations. I say “fictional,” yet in Lileana Blain-Cruz’s furiously time-warping Lincoln Center Theater production the modern black women enduring high-value, low-pay jobs for white employers were just as venturesome as their spiritual forebear, exploring the limits of the human capacity to care for others.

‘BLKS’

Whether you call it a renaissance or an emergency, the agonizing subject of race in non-post-racial America continues to turn out superior plays by black playwrights. Many use the very structure of theater to dramatize the ways we look at each other. But it is also useful, powerful and, in the case of Aziza Barnes’ “BLKS,” a flat-out joy ride to see black life onstage as it is lived without (much) reference to whites. Under Robert O’Hara’s hold-onto-your seats staging for MCC Theater, this roommate comedy (with a hefty afterkick) was just the release we needed.

‘Octet’

It was a dreadful year for new musicals. A few — like Michael R. Jackson’s “A Strange Loop” off Broadway and “Hadestown” and “Tootsie” on Broadway — had at least some of the ingredients needed to lift the impossible art form into excellence: thematic ambition, exacting skill, dramatic coherence and superior staging. But only Dave Malloy’s chamber opera about electronic addiction, directed by Annie Tippe for, again, the Signature Theater, had them all, and gorgeous music to boot. It left me both horrified by the indiscriminate electronic appetite of the internet but also thrilled by the survival of painstaking, handmade craft.

‘Much Ado About Nothing’

It was the slap heard ’round Central Park. Escorting Shakespeare’s great comedy into a #MeToo, Black Lives Matter world, the director Kenny Leon moved the action in this Public Theater production to 2020 Atlanta, rendering the idea of romantic resistance as timely as it is classic. But given that timeliness, how could he drive the play’s “merry war” to its happy ending? That’s where the slap came in, as a woman named Hero reset her fiancé’s clock with a solid smack. For a few summer evenings at the Delacorte Theater, that was a huge civic release and a good start.

‘Before the Meeting’

Another play set in a church basement? Adam Bock’s drama, directed by Trip Cullman for the Williamstown Theater Festival, set you up to expect nothing but naturalism from a handful of recovering alcoholics and drug addicts preparing coffee for their 12-step meetings. But as the play dug deeper, its realistic trappings dropped away, leaving the off Broadway treasure Deirdre O’Connell to deliver a stupendous 25-minute monologue that ripped open the story with heartbreaking self-reproach. Phantoms, she showed, do not come unbidden into our lives; we invite them, over and over.

‘Make Believe’

If you don’t like plays about children, wait until you see what children become. That’s one way of looking at Bess Wohl’s tragicomedy featuring four siblings, ages 5 through 12. Though we know something is very wrong — where are their parents? — we don’t know what it is until we meet them anew, 32 years later, haunted not only by what has happened in the interim but also by who they once were. In Michael Greif’s pinpoint production for Second Stage Theater, the very idea of personal growth came to seem dubious: In searching for the self, everyone is hurtfully selfish.

‘Slave Play’

I’ve twice pulled out my big adjectives for Jeremy O. Harris’ play about three interracial couples on an “antebellum sexual performance therapy” retreat. I’ve also heeded criticism of it from those who find its vision of racial reconciliation perverse. But for me, Harris’ metaphor for the ghostly afterlife of America’s peculiar institution remains as theatrically rich — and as hilarious and scalding, in a staging, once again, by Robert O’Hara — as any to date. If it weren’t so perverse, it wouldn’t be true.

‘Heroes of the Fourth Turning’

You’d think a play about the theological and political debates of four friends at a college reunion would not get much traction in New York, especially if those friends are enthusiastic Catholic conservatives who voted for Donald Trump. Yet Will Arbery’s deep dive into the struggling souls of red-state dreamers is for those very reasons one of the best plays of the year, forcing us into a form of sympathy with the devil. Danya Taymor’s production for Playwrights Horizons dared to explore their lives and ideas with affection, understanding and deep knowledge — if not, ultimately, approval.

‘Is This a Room’

Documentary theater is too often a dry exercise, but in this play — a staged transcription of an FBI interrogation — reality is just a template for drama. Reality Winner is also the wonderful name of the woman convicted of leaking a classified intelligence report to the press, and in Emily Davis’ spectacular performance this apparently sunny Iran specialist and CrossFit aficionado achieved the gravity of Greek drama. In a year that often seemed overflooded with reality, Tina Satter’s impeccable production for the Vineyard Theater helped us see through the torrent of words into the eternal mysteries of human resistance.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .